Changing commuting patterns in Crawley

The 2021 Census took some time to be released, an extra year in fact if my recollection of the 2011 Census is correct. Some of this simply reflects the difficulty of the task they faced trying to produce an accurate picture of the UK for the next decade while the country was in lockdown, but one upside is that they do appear to have improved upon the mess which was involved in extracting local data from the last Census by producing a GIS providing access to much of the data.

While flicking through the various questions, I was interested to come across the slides detailing average commutes for workers across Crawley, which gave the remarkable statistic that almost half of workers in one part of town largely working from home. Now, bear in mind that while this was over a year into the pandemic, we were still subject to various restrictions, but the most significant thing here is the disparity with only 16.3% of residents in Broadfield West working mainly from home compared to 42.% of workers in Maidenbower East and Worth.

There are lot of correlated factors at play here, beginning with the fact that wealth in the town is clearly divided on an East/West axis, the history of which really merits a long blog post of its own. High income jobs tend to be more knowledge based and consequently can be done anywhere, whereas low income jobs are generally focused on more physical activity which requires people to be present within the workplace. Consequently, the further East we go the greater the level of people working from home.

The bigger question to my mind is what this means long-term. The need to commute a fair distance (usually into London) is one reason people with more high income jobs tend to be more prevalent in the East of Crawley, due to the fast train connectivity from Three Bridges and ease of access onto the M23. This connectivity is one of the reasons why properties in Forge Wood have sold far quicker than those in Kilnwood Vale, despite the developers in Kilnwood Vale making much of the neighbourhood being part of Horsham and not Crawley (if there’s one thing Crawley’s recession-proof house prices show its that there’s considerable demand to move into our area, particularly given that those from out of area don’t tend to suffer from the anti-New Town bigotry many of our neighbours seem to retain 76 years on from the town’s founding). This connectivity continues to make the town attractive to those from London who are looking to get more for their money when buying their first home.

The question is, if people no longer need to commute into London so frequently, how will that affect where knowledge workers choose to live? Will we see Londoners instead looking further afield for somewhere to live and will we find a greater social mixing of different income groups?

Probably not. There are other reasons why the East/West Split exists within the town and income groups always have a tendency to cluster. However, the data does serve as a reminder the very different working conditions community members experience, that more needs to be done to promote greater social mixing to maintain a strong sense of community where people are otherwise living very different lives, and that the assumptions we have made around the town’s infrastructure (particularly in terms of transport) in the past, may well no longer take into account the changing nature of work within the town.